Howdy folks,
Every day we hear from more and more enterprise customers who are eager to go cloud only managing their Windows 10 laptops. Unfortunately, one thing has been standing in their way -up until now, there has never been a good way to print to a corporate printer from an Azure AD joined device.
Today I’m happy to let you know that this is no longer true! We’ve just released Microsoft Hybrid Cloud Print, a print solution built specifically for Azure Active Directory-joined and Intune-managed devices. Now people in your organization can use Azure AD-joined devices to discover on-premise printers, and can print from work or from home or from anywhere else they can connect to the internet.
How cool is that?!
Hybrid Cloud Print is built on top of the Windows Print Server role, so it supports traditional domain-joined devices in addition to Azure AD joined devices. Best of all, your existing printer management scripts, tools, reports, and procedures will continue to work as is. And its secured by Azure Active Directory, so you and your users still benefit from features like multi-factor authentication, identity protection and single sign-on (SSO).
Once deployed, the print discovery and installation experience will be familiar to your users.
Figure 1: Printer discovery in OS Settings
Figure 2 : Filter printer search results by location and/or keywords
Figure 3: Cloud printers have their own unique printer icon
The print experience is the same as printing to any other printer.
Figure 4 : Printing from Edge browser
Solution overview
Hybrid Cloud Print consists of two new IIS service endpoints:
- Printer Discovery service
- Windows Print service
There are also six new MDM policies to configure and manage Hybrid Cloud Print. These enable the client device to know where the IIS service endpoints are and which
Azure tenant information to authorize against.
To get started, take a look at the Hybrid Cloud Print overview, watch the Ignite 2017 session on Hybrid Cloud Print, and follow the deployment guide. And
be sure to tell us what you think! We always want to hear from you.
Best regards,
Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)
Director of Program Management
Microsoft Identity Division